This week we have begun to solidify our research projects relating to the Hungerford School. My teammate and I have noticed some interesting patterns revolving around religion in relation to the school throughout its history that we would like to explore. We will again be using Bill Ferster's ASSERT model to organize and strategize our thought processes in creating a visualization for our project (Ferster 2012, 39).
Using this model, our first step is to ‘Ask’ our research questions (Ferster 2012, 45). My teammate and I will be focusing on slightly different questions; however, they are thematically linked, and therefore should fit together well in our final visualization. My focus is primarily on the later years of the Hungerford School and is especially concerned with the board of trustees. Who were the Hungerford School board of trustees? And was there a religious component involved with their control of the school?
The next step in the model is ‘Search’ (Ferster 2012, 64). The sources I am using to compile my data include three court case files, the 1950 Federal Census, and local newspapers that have been digitized online. Using these sources to create the ‘Structure’ of the project, I have created a spreadsheet with a timeline of the board of trustees' terms through the school’s history to visualize the quantitative data of who was in control of the school, when, and for how long (Ferster 2012, 79). Additionally, I have created another spreadsheet that looks specifically at the successor trustees in 1952 who were ultimately responsible for the deed transfer of the school to OCPS. My primary objective is to investigate who they were, where they lived, and why they might have been involved.
Now that the data has begun to reveal some interesting things, I can ‘Envision’ additional factors and work toward design synthesis, which Ferster explains is “the application of abductive reasoning to a problem by finding relationships and patterns among the data elements and externalizing those relationships by identifying them by name, ranking them in importance, and linking them to various perspectives” (Ferster 2012, 88). During this part of the process, I’ve envisioned several additional ideas that might direct my future work on the project:
Trustees may have been connected to churches and could have been appointed because their churches contributed to the school. What impact would that have had on the curriculum and administration of the school?
It was noted that the school was “non-denominational.” Was this because of the multiple different types of churches involved with the board of trustees?
Were any of the churches on the board local to Eatonville? Or were they all outside actors? How did that affect the autonomy of the religious education students received? And how did it affect the Eatonville community's relationship with the school?
The successor trustees in 1952 were overwhelmingly associated with the Presbyterian church. Was this because they were the group that considered taking the school over after the Bethune-Cookman alliance fell through? And if so, why were they appointed by the court in 1950 and not the previous board?
The next step in the model is ‘Represent the Visualization’ (Ferster 2012, 106). Representing this data could be done via some sort of timeline and social networking mapping. An ArcGIS StoryMap could best accomplish this and would allow for other interactive elements to be added, such as newspaper clippings and images of the board members to add visual emphasis of their connection (or lack of connection) to Eatonville and the Hungerford School.
The final step in the model is to ‘Tell the Story’ (Ferster 2012, 176). A StoryMap would also allow my team to tell the story of the relationship between the Hungerford School, the board of trustees, and religion in ways that can distill, combine and elaborate our data into a narrative that will provide a compelling tool for the Preserve Eatonville Community to use in their work to save Eatonville's history (Ferster 2012, 178). We believe that the religious component of the story could reveal key context in the deed transfer. We hope that our analysis will uncover patterns that link white philanthropists, churches, the school, and the legal system in ways that can help contextualize the rise and fall of the Hungerford School.
Update: We've just learned about Scalar, so I will be exploring that as an option for my visualization since it can utilize ArcGIS StoryMaps and so much more!
Bibliography
Ferster, Bill. Interactive Visualization: Insight Through Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.
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